The World on a Couch

Georges Federman is a psychiatrist. The walls of his narrow study are lined with a jumble of newspaper cuttings like a crime invesitgator’s, proof of his fascination for all manner of scandal the world over. As for colour, his garish coloured T-shirts run through the sequences like the changing of the seasons branded with unequivocal militancy. Opposite this larger than life character, we see a steady stream of patients coming to try to lighten their load a little, to make their lives more bearable. French or foreign, asylum seekers or illegal immigrants from the same part of Strasbourg or another continent, talkative or taciturn, rhetoricians or stutterers, narcissistic or neurotic, each of them fi nds a listening ear and stimulating repartee in Federman. We too are all ears, spectators of these sketches that are sometimes comic, tragic, or tragi-comic, witness to these troubles, big and small, which are immeasurable in reality. There’s no sign of a couch, no-one lies down here and as for the world, we catch glimpses of it, snapshots of different worlds recounted daily. (Doc Alliance Films)